A number of high-end video routing and distribution systems currently exist. One example is the Optima system of the AutoPatch™ division of XN Technologies, Inc. of Cheney, Wash. This configured system can handle many different types of audio and video signals.
Such video routing and distribution systems, sometimes referred to as video switches, are lagging behind the introduction of an ever increasing variety of available video formats. Conventional video switches support a number of available video formats but cannot, as a practical matter, support all video formats since the variety of video formats is growing at an increasing rate. Aside from the standard television formats, NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, video formats can be analog or digital, interlaced or progressive scan, various resolutions, various aspect ratios, various frame rates, etc. Analog formats include composite video, S-video, YUV, and RGB, for example. Digital formats include DVI, DVI+HDCP, HDMI, SDI, and HD-SDI, for example. Currently used video resolutions include 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1280×720, 1400×1050, 1600×1200, 1920×1080, and 2048×1536, for example. Currently used aspect ratios include 4:3, 5:4, and 16:9, for example. And currently used frame rates include 24 Hz, 25 Hz, 29.97 Hz, 30 Hz, 50 Hz, 59.94 Hz, 60 Hz, 72 Hz, and 85 Hz, for example.
Various combinations of these and other parameters of video signals can number in the hundreds, perhaps thousands, and new formats are being added with surprising frequency. Even if a video switch could feasibly support all such currently-implemented formats, the apparently inevitable introduction of a new format would immediately render such a video switch incomplete as the new format would not be supported.
Besides the impossible task of supporting all currently available video formats and any new ones that might be adopted in the future, current video switches have other disadvantages. For example, while current video switches can send one incoming video signal to multiple destinations, current video switches lack the ability to send multiple input audiovisual signals to the same output device (e.g., picture-in-picture or picture-beside-picture), to process audiovisual signals of different formats simultaneously, and to receive an audiovisual signal of one format and deliver the audiovisual signal to a display device in another format.
What is needed is a particularly efficient and flexible audiovisual signal routing and distribution system that can handle multiple input signals of various formats simultaneously and that can receive an audiovisual signal of one format and deliver the audiovisual signal to a display device in a different format so that any received signal can be displayed on any attached display device.